Time to power up!

Empowerment is a cultural thing. It depends on the environment in which one is operating. Throughout my life, I have been directly involved with technology. I’ve been interested in it, and it has been something towards which I have always been drawn. As a result, I quickly became identified as a “nerd” or a “geek”. I spent afternoons working on the computer or playing games, and I became very familiar and comfortable with the systems. As a result of having done this, I have nurtured an attitude of giving things a go. You know, the space where you have the freedom to take a shot at figuring something out. I won’t get it on the first attempt, but I’ll give it a fairly good effort. I believe this can be attributed to years of trying to get programs and games to work, to repairing internet connections and on being exposed to new platforms. One has to immerse oneself to become capable and familiar with the material. Without having gone through the trial-and-error process, I do not feel I would be as equipped to work with digital media as I am now.

I think there’s a general assumption that often happens when one observes someone being good at something. I’m certainly guilty of falling into the trap of thinking that someone is just naturally gifted and that their talent comes to them without much effort at all. Really, the exact opposite is usually true: it’s hours and hours of working at the task that creates familiarity and, eventually, mastery and not just raw talent. Of course, talent plays a part in all this—aptitude cannot be ignored completely—but it’s the effort that is made that makes all the difference. 

None of what I’m saying is particularly new or revelatory. This is all stuff that people like Malcolm Gladwell and Ken Robinson have been writing about for years. What I think hasn’t necessarily been spoken about, though, relates directly to what I do for most of my working days: deal with getting staff and students to be more capable and empowered users of technology.

Any of us who work in technology know that much of our time is spent troubleshooting. It can range from something as simple as needing to change a setting on an iPad to needing to rebuild servers to ensure that essential services are running. Almost every day, I have students and staff members coming to see me to get their digital textbooks working, or their wifi configured, or their email set up or to sort out their wireless presentation software etc. While I am always glad to help with this, I’ve begun to realise that this is not actually educationally sound practice. 

I am, first and foremost, a teacher. Our jobs as teachers are to empower others, to help them to see their own potential and to enable them to do things that they did not know they were capable of doing. Often, to do this we must push our students to do new things. We have to provide the space in which they can work things out for themselves, and, in so doing, develop the ability to be more self-reliant in future. Taking over the task for them defeats the purpose completely and often has a negative impact.

Let me illustrate this with a personal example: when I was young, I often wanted to help my father with tasks. I would try to help with the gardening, or sweeping or painting, or washing the car, but always the story ended the same way: he took over and did everything. It was always quicker and easier for him to do the job himself, so that’s what he did. Eventually I stopped offering to help and when I was asked to do things, I deliberately did a bad job so that he would just take over and I could get back to whatever I was doing (usually playing computer games). I learnt nothing. And now when I need to do things around the house, I lament the fact that I haven’t learnt them. Luckily the troubleshooting mindset I have from working with computers means I have a method of sorting out the problem, but it would be preferable if I had a clearer frame of reference. 

So, now I’m starting to employ this in my own day-to-day practice. I don’t just take the iPad or mouse from the student or teacher, I talk them through the process, or I point them in a direction. For many people, computers and technology continue to be sources of intimidation and bafflement; otherworldly pursuits for select individuals who “get it”. The problem with this is that the computer stuff is not going away. It’s not even slowing down. If people want to be equipped for life in the future (and by ‘future’ I mean any time ahead and not some dark Blade Runner-eque world), they are going to need to know how to take charge of this technology and not be trumped by it.

As teacher trainers and teachers, we need to be empowerers. We need to create spaces where our ‘customers’ feel able to take chances, to investigate, to fiddle, to ‘see what this button does’. If we’re not doing that, we are not fulfilling the fundamental purpose of our job, and that is a very sad thing indeed.

We need to ensure that our strategies for staff development are focused on taking the fear away, on helping people learn how to troubleshoot their own problems and to give things a go. Once that culture has been created, those of us who are doing the training can spend more time on extending and showing people how to make technology an even more powerful teaching tool and how to move the curriculum in exciting and meaningful directions. We are all ‘computer people’ now, and the sooner we all start acting like it, the better.

Flow: A dichotomy in two Apps

I have a weekly ritual on Wednesdays: I browse the App stores to see what’s changed. Usually I find something intriguing or worth playing around with, but these are seldom really significant ‘Wow, my life has changed’ Apps. In fact, what often grabs me more about the Apps is the concept they’re exploring rather than the programme itself. Take ‘The Mesh’ for example, which is the current Free App of the Week on iTunes. The beauty and power of the App lie in its simplicity. It’s not complicated, and yet it’s immensely engrossing. I found myself spending hours trying to up my score, and then suddenly I realised I was doing mathematics. To add context to that statement, you need to understand that mathematics and I are like estranged family members: we know we can’t really ever escape one another, but if we never have to engage in conversation, that’s just fine. Nevertheless, at 23:00 last night, there I was, propped up in bed trying to work out how 7, 5, 3 and 2 were going to get me to 4. As it happens, I couldn’t work it out, and my streak ended on a measly final score of 32. I will persevere again tonight!

'The Mesh'

Now, what intrigues me so much about ‘The Mesh’ is the fact that I became completely engrossed in a very short space of time. The nature of the game means there is no ‘undo’ button, and an incorrect pairing can be one’s complete undoing for the levels to come. As a consequence, one must spend time assessing the whole scenario, planning moves and anticipating outcomes. The mental arithmetic is not complicated (well, it hasn’t been for the levels I’ve managed to reach), but having to work out multiple scenarios in one’s head becomes a challenging prospect. For the example above, there are a number of different things I could try:

7 - 3 = 4; 5+2 = 7… doesn’t work

7-5 = 2; 2+2 = 4, 3… doesn’t work

3-2 = 1; 5-1=4; 7… doesn’t work

You get the idea.

Before even starting to play the level, one has to run all these simulations in one’s head. The feeling of triumph when one gets it correct is intoxicating and I’m left utterly engrossed. And it’s maths.

The second App which has caught my attention this week is ‘Flowstate’ on the Mac App store. While I’ve not yet taken the plunge and purchased the App, it’s premise is certainly food for thought. Basically, Flowstate creates the perfect environment in which to create written pieces by preventing the clutter that so often prevents us from actually completing what we’re writing. The creators posit that forcing separation between the creation and editing processes encourages the completion of tasks. The App works by asking users to select a time period to be ‘locked’ into the App. Once the time has been selected, the user must write continuously. A pause of more than 5 seconds will delete everything that has been written during the session. Furthermore, trying to exit the session before time is up will also delete everything. Quite an unnerving prospect for those of us who are used to agonising over just about every sentence we type. I’m certainly guilty of spending ages and ages staring at the screen trying to figure out the way forward. With Flowstate, there’s no time for that—at least not while you’re writing. You have to keep going, even if it’s not going to make it into the final edit. 

And that’s the whole point: it doesn’t have to be perfect. So often we get utterly caught up on ensuring that the end product is a work of perfection that we end up not finishing it, or, even worse, not starting in the first place. Flowstate prevents that from happening by forcing action, but making us let go of the obsession with perfection and simply getting us to write write write and think later. Working on a finished piece and making small tweaks here and there is far less daunting than staring at a blank page for ages, and the prospect of everything vanishing before one’s eyes means we keep pushing onwards until we have something with which to work.

Both of these Apps look at the idea of focus and flow in a different way: the first requires measured, thought-through selection, because there is no going back while the second is almost the polar opposite: go for it without reservation and deal with the aftermath later. I think both of them have a place in education. Our students should know when to apply themselves to one task with utter focus and careful consideration, especially when it comes to dealing with other people, because often we cannot take things we’ve said back after they have been said (or tweeted). Conversely, we should also be encouraging our students to dive into tasks with a sense of abandonment. Increased digitisation means that we can undo just about everything we create within Apps or programmes and our work can be altered if and when it needs to be. We need to give students the freedom to fail and not be too perturbed by this, because refining is often a better learning experience than the initial creation is. I’ll look at the culture of refinement and criticism in another blog, but for now, I think it’s worth pondering how we can use these two kinds of flow in our teaching and indeed, in our own lives. 

Txt msg?

For many of us, the title of this blog harkens back to a period of digital communication where each character we typed matterd (see what I did there?). Much like Twitter posts, each text message we sent was limited to a specific number of characters, including spaces, and we had to cram as much as we could into that space. During an age where each text message cost a portion of our precious airtime (especially if it was sent in peak time), we had to make sure we got as much bang from each keystroke as we could. Thus, the language of text messaging or sms-language was born. Whole new lexicons were developed to figure out how to maximise the communication power of our 160 characters and we still adopt many of them today: “LOL” has become so commonplace that many people use it in ordinary speech, and “brb” is still an expression that many of us will hurriedly type into a chat bubble when we run to make a cup of tea, or answer a phone call. Apart from that, though, with the coming of messaging becoming almost exclusively over the internet (as opposed to via direct cellular), message length is no longer an issue with which we need to concern ourselves, nor is the number of messages we send. As a result, there has been a steady dying out of text language, because it is an unnecessary shortcut most of the time. Instead of worrying about how to make “Please can you come to see me tomorrow” as short as possible, (Pls cm c me 2mrw) we can just type the whole thing. Predictive text has made the process even easier, and even it may be on the decline as sending voice notes and using speech-to-text software is becoming increasingly easier and popular. 

Why am I bringing this up here and now, though? After all, this is meant to be an educational blog, and not simply a nostalgic look at where we’ve been. What point is there looking at an almost outdated method of communication when so many more exciting possibilities exist? 

The reason for my exploring this has to do with the hysteria that surrounded txt msgin. Parents, teachers and academics all over the world deplored the phenomenon saying that it meant people were not going to be able to spell anymore, that language sophistication was slipping and that people weren’t going to know how to communicate anymore. Well, none of that happened really, did it? As far as I can tell, there has been no catastrophic consequence of a generation of people who are unable to communicate with one another any more than there has been in the past. In fact, I would like to argue that precisely the opposite has happened: we are more in contact with each other than we have ever been. And the next generation is even more connected. This is a trend that I do not see changing.

As technology allows us to merge more and more services into one place (currently I have two text messages, an iMessage, three Whatsapps and something on Facebook messenger all waiting on my phone and on my Mac at the same time, oh and I’ve taken three calls this morning and answered a few emails while still having several face-to-face conversations with colleagues and students… and it’s 10AM), connectedness is inescapable. It has become such a part of our everyday lives that we barely register the extent to which we are communicating. If you were to imagine each conversation as a ball to be juggled, I imagine most of us would be walking around with our arms whirling around in a blur. 

Text messaging did not kill communication. Nor has it killed language. It has evolved it certainly, but that’s what’s meant to happen with a living language. Were it not for this phenomenon, then verily, I say unto thee that we would still be speaking like Chaucer did, and wherefore wouldst we wish to make that commonplace occurrence? 

The reaction of people to text messaging is akin to many reactions to any innovation that alters the way we approach things. I remember Facebook being dismissed as a fad, and I know many people did not see the point of the first iPad. This trend of resisting the new is something that is seemingly endemic and it is a huge problem. I do not propose that we all naively accept or welcome every shiny new thing that emerges from Silicon Valley or any associated philosophy, but I think we would all benefit from an attitude that says, “Let’s take a look at this thing and see what it can do.” rather than, “This challenges how I look at [insert variable here]. I don’t want anything to do with it.” Being open to new and potentially revolutionary ways of doing things presents a wonderful opportunity to reflect and consider if what we’re doing really is best practice and, even if we ultimately conclude that tried and tested is the best route, at least we’ve given it some thought, which is always helpful.

Cmnts r wlcm ;)